Krishnamurthy on Wittkugel's poster designs: "The exhibition includes a tight selection of posters from the 1950s through 1970s, only a small portion of what Klaus Wittkugel designed over his long career. Wittkugel's exhibition designs for his retrospectives in the 1960s and 1970s were often jam-packed with work: walls full of posters, boards featuring exhibition designs, logos, and more. He even went so far as to include a full-scale reproduction of one of his exhibition displays in a later retrospective. I've taken a more sparing approach to installation, but also refer to his strategies through specific conceptual elements: For example, by presenting my curatorial wall text about posters in exactly the same manner as the other posters."

Comments

"P! is a particular space: a so-called 'white cube' designed by architects Leong Leong, but with its own peculiarities. Furthermore, the ceiling is a site-specific work, Pink Ceiling, 2015, by Julie Ault and Martin Beck. The layout of the gallery is a quirky open-square, which is reimagined for nearly ever show," says Krishnamurthy, who launched the gallery in 2012. "I've used the space to its full advantage here, as I'm fitting a mini-retrospective of almost 50 years of Klaus Wittkugel's work into a single room. Each section of the show is installed in its own manner; they coexist in the space together. Out in the front of the gallery, I've 'exaggerated' an existing column by sheathing it with a cardboard column that is wheat-pasted with reproductions of works by both Klaus Wittkugel and his West German contemporary, Anton Stankowski. It's a comparative treatment, an art historical argument, in physical form."

Comments

"It's hard to pick out any one aspect out of Klaus Wittkugel's work, as he was so prolific and wide-ranging, but I do find his book covers from the late 1940s and early 1950s extremely striking. They are mostly abstract compositions of typography and form, which translate the content of the book into a mini-artwork. If we had more space, we would have presented much more of this type of work," says Krishnamurthy, who is himself a graphic designer and devised the show's exhibition displays. "Here, too, I've inserted my curatorial voice into the form that it's describing—as an open book spread—lest anyone think that this is an unmediated or neutral presentation."